Despairagus Madame Mallory (Dame Helen Mirren) demands that even the vegetables in her haute-cuisine, French restaurant stand at attention. "The Hundred-Foot Journey" opens August 8 at Bay Area theatres.

Despairagus Madame Mallory (Dame Helen Mirren) demands that even the vegetables in her haute-cuisine, French restaurant stand at attention. "The Hundred-Foot Journey" opens August 8 at Bay Area theatres.

Photo: DreamWorks

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Just desserts Madame Mallory (Dame Helen Mirren) conducts guerrilla warfare of the tasty kind against a new Indian restaurant across from her palace of haute cuisine in a village in the South of France.

Just desserts Madame Mallory (Dame Helen Mirren) conducts guerrilla warfare of the tasty kind against a new Indian restaurant across from her palace of haute cuisine in a village in the South of France.

Photo: DreamWorks

'The Hundred-Foot Journey' review: a trip worth taking

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The Hundred-Foot Journey

There's nothing corny about "The Hundred-Foot Journey," nothing quaint or false. It could have been all those things, given the slightest wrong push, but this is a Lasse Hallstrom film, and he doesn't push. At his best - and he's at his best here - he just tends the garden with meticulous compositions and unforced performances and lets things blossom.

The result is that this is one of those rare movies that gets better as it goes along. It unfolds, one incident into the next, in what feels like a methodical pace, until very soon everything about it feels lived in, and realized. Other directors are rushing and rushing and yet their movies go on forever and feel like it. Hallstrom always seems like he's lavishing time on everything, and yet the action keeps moving forward.

Here's one shot that tells you the difference between a really good director and just anybody: Two young people are riding bicycles toward each other, and they're going over a little country bridge in a French village. The situation is uncomfortable, because the two are estranged, and yet they like each other. The young woman's bicycle exits the shot, and as the young man reaches the middle of the bridge, he hears laughter in the distance and turns in the direction of the sound. The camera moves slightly and we see, in long shot, an idyllic country vista and a man and woman in a rowboat.

The shot, maybe eight seconds in a two-hour movie, gives you everything. It's a status update on the state of one of the film's principal relationships, a snapshot from life, a vision of paradise, an emblem of the young man's longing, and probably one or two other things that elude description. It's rich, and seems inevitable, but it's really only there because a director had the sensitivity to feel it and put it there.

"The Hundred-Foot Journey" is about an Indian family that relocates to Europe with the intention of opening an Indian restaurant somewhere on the continent. Their car breaks down in rural France, and the patriarch (Om Puri) falls in love with a property that happens to be across the street from a Michelin starred restaurant. Despite the exalted competition just one hundred feet away, he decides to locate his new restaurant there, which puts him into contact with the Michelin restaurant's stiff-backed owner, played by Helen Mirren.

A lot happens in "The Hundred-Foot Journey," but because none of it is earth-shattering, there's a temptation to reveal too much of the story, if only for the sake of talking about different aspects of it. This is a temptation best avoided, because much of the appeal of the film is in the way it meanders and grows and breaks out of the usual confines.

"The Hundred-Foot Journey" is about food and life, but not in the typical way of movies that dreamily "celebrate" both and make you want to throw up. The film isn't starry-eyed about food, but intelligent about it. It has ideas about food, which it does not spell out, but which are implicit. The movie extols the respective boldness and subtleties of traditional Indian and traditional French cuisine. It stresses the importance of fresh vegetables with "soul," and it's not against experimentation. But it raises an eyebrow at food faddism, at innovation for the sake of innovation, and it's no accident that the worst-looking food in the movie is seen at a trendy Paris restaurant.

As a talented cook with an innate gift, Manish Dayal starts off wide-eyed, then takes on a more complicated quality as the film goes on. Om Puri lends the father his wise, fleshy-nosed humanity - he's like an Indian Philippe Noiret ("Cinema Paradiso") or Walter Matthau. And though I can't help wondering what an actual French actress might have done with the role of a French woman, Helen Mirren is an undeniable delight. At one point, Hallstrom films the formidable Madame (Mirren) from behind as she eats an omelet, and you can tell the precise moment that she realizes that the cook has talent.

The French character actor Michel Blanc plays the mayor of the village, and he gets considerable comic mileage out of a relatively small role.

By the time "The Hundred-Foot Journey" ends, it has achieved an unexpected and rather powerful cumulative impact. I felt like I knew the people and wouldn't mind staying there.